David Scott - The Love That Made Mother Teresa: Special Canonization Edition

David Scott

The Love That Made
Mother Teresa

How Her Secret Visions
and Dark Nights Can Help You
Conquer the Slums of Your Heart

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS

Manchester, New Hampshire

The Love That Made Mother Teresa , first published in 2013, is a revised version of A Revolution of Love: The Meaning of Mother Teresa , published by Loyola Press, Chicago, in 2005. This special 2016 edition has been revised to reflect Mother Teresas canonization by Pope Francis on September 4, 2016.

Copyright 2013, 2016 David Scott

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Cover design by Carolyn McKinney

On the cover : Mother Teresa Praying (U88243061) Bettmann / CORBIS

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Scott, David, 1961- author.

Title: The love that made Mother Teresa : how her secret visions and dark

nights can help you conquer the slums of your heart / David Scott.

Other titles: Revolution of love

Description: Manchester, New Hampshire : Sophia Institute Press, 2016. |

Originally published: 2013. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022605 | ISBN 9781622823628 (pbk. : alk. paper) ePub ISBN 978-1-622823-635

Subjects: LCSH: Teresa, Mother, 1910-1997.

Classification: LCC BX4406.5.Z8 S36 2016 | DDC 271/.97 dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022605

For Jacob

Contents

by Most Reverend Jos H. Gomez

Foreword

The Church is beautiful in her saints. One of the Church Fathers said that long ago. And its true.

The saints are living witnesses to Jesus Christ in every age and every culture. They show us what following Christ looks like in real life and how to fulfill Gods plan for our lives which is for us to become more like Jesus and become saints ourselves.

As David Scott writes in this fine little book, St. Teresa of Kolkata was probably the most familiar Christian face of our generation. Her works of love, done for the abandoned and forsaken in a remote city in India, made hers a household name the world over.

This book represents something of a new way of writing about the saints. Its part biography, part spiritual reading of our times. There is also a strong apologetic aspect. Scott suggests that Mother Teresa is Gods response to the signs of our times a witness to the power and beauty of the gospel message in a world marked by the shadow of death and a growing indifference to God.

Mother Teresa gave up her privileged position and all her possessions to live as one of the worlds poor and forgotten and to bring them the light of Christ and the love of God. Her message to the rest of us was direct: we should seek our salvation in the God who comes to us in the poor and the outcast. We should seek Jesus at the margins of society in what she called his distressing disguise.

Always she returned to Jesus parable of the last judgment: As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.

Our Holy Father Pope Francis has said that we should reread often the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthews Gospel, where Jesus identifies himself with the least of these the hungry and the thirsty, the naked and the sick, the prisoner and the immigrant. If you want to know what you actually have to do, the pope says, read Matthew Chapter 25, which is the standard by which we will be judged.

Mother Teresa told us the same thing. Again and again, she reminded us that our love for the poor would be the measure of our love for God. We love God as much as we love the most vulnerable and despised among us. What we give to them, we give to him. The love we refuse them is the love we refuse God.

In her life, Mother Teresa did everything for the love of Jesus and the truth of his gospel. She understood that truth without love is cruelty and love without truth is sentimentality. So she spoke the truth in love through her work with the poor and the dying, through her advocacy for the unborn and the handicapped, through her dedication to peace and justice in the world. And through her witness, we came to see that in Gods eyes we are all his beloved sons and daughters and no one should be a stranger to any of us.

As St. Francis did many centuries before, Mother Teresa preached the gospel with her life. And love was the language she used. She understood that love alone is credible in a world where more and more people have drifted from God and live as if he does not exist.

Thats why the saints are so important. Because our world will be converted, not by words and programs, but by witnesses. By people who will testify through the way they live that Jesus Christ is real and that his gospel has the power to change lives. Our world will be converted only by saints.

Scotts book reminds us, as Mother Teresa always did, that God calls all of us to holiness, to be saints maybe not saints who are known on the world stage, as Mother Teresa was, but saints of the everyday and missionaries of his love. He calls us to bear witnesses to his love in the ordinary events and activities of our daily lives in our homes, at school, in the places where we work, going out to meet people wherever they are, even in the shadows and margins of our society.

My prayer is that this book will help us to grow in our appreciation of this amazing woman of God. May we give ourselves to our Blessed Mother Mary, as Mother Teresa did. And may Mother Teresas life inspire us to love as she loved making our lives something beautiful that we may offer to God.

Most Reverend Jos H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles
December 16, 2013

Part I

The Scent of Sanctity

You know my God.

My God is called love.

Mother Teresa

A Mother Made Blessed

Whats so special about Mother Teresa? Why did everybody from the president of the United States to your neighbor next door call her a living saint? Why, now that she is dead, is the Roman Catholic Church ready to affirm with finality that she is dwelling in heaven, near to the face of God, a saint from whom we can ask prayers and after whom we can pattern our lives?

If we go with the official definition of a saint from the Catholic catechism, we would say she is worthy of sainthood because she practiced heroic virtue that she lived by faith, hope, and love and was prudent, just, temperate, and brave. St. John Paul II said as much on October 19, 2003, when he beatified Mother Teresa during a solemn ceremony before a throng of three hundred thousand devotees in St. Peters Square at the Vatican.

In advancing her status from blessed to saint on September 4, 2016, Pope Francis described her as a living witness to Gods mercy. Francis had met Mother Teresa in Rome in 1994, when he was still a cardinal from Buenos Aires. At the time, he joked about how tough she was, saying he would have been afraid of her if she had been his religious superior.

Mother Teresa, in fact, met all four of the popes who have led the Catholic Church since the mid-1960s and she left her mark on each of them. Not only for her toughness, but for her humble love for Jesus and her selfless service to the poorest of the poor. But force of personality alone does not explain why the Church has inscribed her name in the official canon or register of saints.

Nonetheless, now that Mother Teresa has been canonized as St. Teresa of Kolkata, you can name churches after her, pray for her help, read her writings as bearing a certain divine stamp of approval, and make her your role model. The Church will celebrate her feast day every year on September 5, the anniversary of the day she died in 1997.